


Hierarchia

by lyndysambora



Category: Guns N' Roses
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, M/M, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:49:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 19,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22027939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyndysambora/pseuds/lyndysambora
Summary: AU. A/B/O.Axl had gotten really good at pretending he was an Alpha. It started as run-of-the-mill anger and hatred, and then it had grown into something else. An armor of sorts, a weapon. A mask. Something other people believed. Everyone believed it.
Relationships: Axl Rose/Izzy Stradlin
Comments: 39
Kudos: 39





	1. I

Axl inspected his hip for a new place to shoot up that wasn’t already sore. Sometimes he did it in the belly or the thigh, but the bruises showed when he wore some of his skimpier stage attire, so he had taken to doing it in the hip or the ass, and just telling any chick he was with that it was from rough sex, ha ha. 

He had acquired a lot of unwanted spankings from using that lie. Spankings right over the goddamn needle tracks while he had pretended to like it. 

He had considered getting a couple of tattoos on his thighs and belly, dark ones, so the bruises wouldn’t show. Bullseyes for the never-ending fucking needles. 

Picking a spot at random on his left hip, he pushed the needle in and emptied the syringe into himself. Safe for another week or so. Maybe. It used to be a month or more, but it was getting less and less effective. The doctor had told him it was normal, it was his age. But it was getting to be total bullshit. It fucked with his mood, and his memory. It fucked with his focus. It fucked with his ability to create. It fucked with everything.

Axl hated being an Omega with a seething passion. Which is why he was the only person on earth, besides his doctor, who knew he was one.

He recapped the syringe and put it back in the leather case with the full ones until he could find a more discreet place to dispose of it than in the trash can in the bedroom he shared with Slash. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed and refused to rub the spot he had just stabbed. Fuck the hormones. 

Axl had suspected he was an Omega since he was a kid. He had thoughts that didn’t jibe with the rest of his personality, soft places in the landscape of his personality-- places he had learned to avoid, like swampland. Those places were dangerous. Everyone else in his family was either an Alpha or Beta, and there was no room for weakness or tenderness there. There was no room for feelings. And Axl had gotten really good at pretending he was an Alpha. It started as run-of-the-mill anger and hatred, and then it had grown into something else. An armor of sorts, a weapon. A mask. Something other people believed. Everyone believed it.

He was sixteen when he fell into heat for the first and only time, and it terrified him. Of course he knew what a heat was, every kid did, it was mandatory as part of public education. He knew everything that was happening to his body as it was happening. But somehow he had convinced himself that if he played the Alpha part hard enough, it might trick his physiology into at least neutralizing the hormones. Mind over matter and all that. No such luck.

Axl had stayed in his room for three days, trying not to panic, and telling his family through the door that he had the flu. He had seen a doctor on his own the following week for the meds. 

Now, at the age of 26, he was up to a shot a week, sometimes every five or six days. He had learned to recognize the bare beginnings of the heats creeping up on him, and when to dose himself in order to neutralize them. The doctor had told him if he just let the heats happen, it would be a lot less of a struggle; he might even go back to falling under the spell of it only once a month or so, a couple days at a time, at most. And if Axl had been a normal person, with a normal life, he might have considered it. But there was no means for him anymore to lock himself away for two or three days with no contact with the outside world, and there was no one else he could share the secret with to help make excuses for him so that the whole world wouldn’t know.

And so, the shots. 

There had been more than a few times when Axl hadn’t been able to dose on time, or the first pricklings of the heat came on too unexpectedly, and his mind had run wild. Horrified. He had cut shows short, or shown up late. He had dashed out of writing sessions and jam sessions and practices. Like today, for instance. The others thought he was just unpredictable and arrogant, which suited him just fine. Went with the Alpha persona. 

Well, at least he thought all the others were convinced he was just unpredictable and arrogant. Axl was fairly certain that Izzy was an Alpha, though the man lived life as a Beta. On more than one occasion, when the heats had crashed into his life, and he had not been able to duck away quickly enough, something had passed between himself and the other man. A knowing of some sort, deeper even than his guts. But Izzy had never brought it up, never acknowledged it in any way other than to simply be a part of that _knowing_ in Axl’s cells. It was possible Axl was wrong about his suspicion, but he didn’t think so. And as long as neither one of them broached the subject-- and Axl continued to use the shots as often as necessary-- it was likely to be a moot point.

\----------------------------------------

“The fuck is it this time?” Slash said, staring down at his fingers as they noodled out a riff. “Anyone wanna take bets? What do you think?”

Duff listened to the notes Slash was playing and began plucking a few strings to accompany him. “Umm… family emergency?”

“Fuck that, did you hear the phone ring? And since when does Ax care about his family?”

“Oh, I know!” Steven piped up. “Explosive diarrhea. Had to get on the shitter quick.”

The three of them dissolved into laughter for a few seconds before Slash said, “We’re going with that one.”

Izzy pulled the cigarette out of his mouth. “Shut the fuck up. Everyone.” 

“The fuck’s your problem?” Duff said, his smile fading only a little.

“I got a headache. And you guys aren’t helping it.”

“Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do without a singer? Again?” Steven asked, tossing his sticks down and running his hands through his hair. “I fucking _woke up_ for this.”

“Try bitching some more. That’s always helped in the past.”

The other three erupted into simultaneous complaining, just like Izzy knew they would. Sighing, he turned up and attempted to work on the song he had started dreaming up the night before. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the notes, instead of the fact he was somewhat aroused. His guitar was slung low, as always, disguising his semi-erection from the rest of the room, and he was so thankful. 

He had been trying to convince himself he didn’t understand why he was a little aroused, but he was pretty sure he knew the reason. Axl had swept by him on his way out of the room, and when he did, Izzy had caught a faint hint of that something that Omegas gave off. It was insane, he told himself. Axl was an Alpha, everyone knew that. And Izzy did find the man attractive, yes, but not in the visceral, heart-stopping way that he would be attracted to an Omega in heat-- especially one that he already had a bit of a soft spot for.

Except that it _had_ been visceral and heart-stopping, and this had made the umpteenth time Axl had disappeared with no explanation, ghost-white, like his life depended on getting the hell out of the room. 

Izzy focused hard on the strings, tuning out the noise of the others, who were now, thank god, mostly bullshitting instead of bitching. The bitching and complaining happened every time, and every time, Izzy had to bring it under control. _Whatever_ it was that was making Axl so unpredictable paled in comparison to the importance of just having him there in the first place. Axl didn’t take well to criticism, especially criticism leveled at him the moment he came back in the door. If they were going to get anything done on these days, it sorely depended on the band not making a big deal out of their singer’s temporary absences. 

The sound of Duff’s voice cut through Izzy’s well-practiced ignoring. 

“I’m gonna go check on him,” the man was saying.

Izzy put his guitar down, forgetting about his hard-on for a moment. “Stay there,” he said. “I’ll go.”

He turned away fast.

The house they shared was big, but old, and desperately needed a lot of work neither they, nor the landlady, were about to do. But the price was right, so they ignored the squishy floors and the holes in the walls, and the broken windows. Hell, Izzy couldn’t even remember how much of the damage was already there when they moved in, and how much they were responsible for. But at least they hadn’t paid a security deposit; upon moving in, the landlady-- a weird old woman with a half a pound of rouge and Miss Clairol blue-black on her beehive hair had promised Izzy that she would forego the security deposit if she could have a go with “the sexy one” some time soon. Izzy had told her it was a deal, and then the rest of the band had argued that night about who “the sexy one” was, each wishing to claim the title, forgetting the fact that the “sexy one” was indebted to show the landlady a good time. 

By instinct, Izzy navigated around all the squishy and squeaky places in the floor as he made his way first to the downstairs bathroom, then, finding it empty, went upstairs to check the second bathroom, and the bedrooms. 

He knew he should knock, but he didn’t.

“The fuck are you doing?” Axl demanded, standing up.

“The fuck are _you_ doing?” Izzy said. “You forget we’re in the middle of practice again?”

“Fuck off, I didn’t _forget again_, you asshole. I’m taking a break.”

Izzy’s gaze landed on the open leather case, full of syringes, on the bed next to where the other man had been sitting. Intuition swirled thick like nausea and desire in his belly, but he trampled it down with his brain, stubborn and stupid. It was heroin or something. All neat and shit in a case, right?

“What are you shooting?”

Axl’s head snapped in the direction of the bed, and then back toward Izzy. His body may have twitched a bit, like he thought about lunging for the evidence, but there was no point. He stood where he was and let it be.

“I will kill you, Stradlin,” he said. His voice shook, but it cut into Izzy’s chest with the precision of a scalpel. 

Axl continued, the trembling of his voice increasing. “I’m not kidding. I’ll fucking kill you if you tell anyone. Nobody on this fucking goddamn _earth_ knows except me and the doctor, and if it gets out, I’ll know it was you.”

Izzy lifted his hands in a surrender gesture. “Calm down, man. I ain’t telling anyone.”

Axl’s jaw had tightened in the way it sometimes did, his lips pressed together into nothingness. His nostrils flared with near-hyperventilation.

“For real,” Izzy added, his hands still raised. “I mean…”

He almost said

_ I already knew_

_How could I not know_

_I felt you in my bones_

that he already knew, but instead he left it at, “…I’m not a talker. You know I’m not.”

At that, he thought he saw Axl’s jaw muscles soften a bit, but it was probably his imagination.

He lowered his hands. “Just come back down when you’re ready, okay? Stevie voted you had the shits, I’ll just tell ‘em that’s what happened.”

Axl’s lips allowed the tiniest smirk. “Fine.”

Safe again on the outside of Axl’s bedroom door, Izzy took a moment to breathe. Just breathe. Deep, from the diaphragm, like a vocal coach had once shown him. The faintest hint of pheromones had been exuding from Axl’s pores, despite his attempt to suppress it. Another ten minutes, and the odor would have been imperceptible. Maybe five minutes. That’s why Izzy hadn’t bothered knocking. He hadn’t wanted to give his friend the chance to hide the evidence. The needles locked it up for him, but he didn’t need them to know. All he needed was the gut punch of the pheromones in an enclosed space, and not in the wind as the other man ran away.

Axl was an Omega.

He looked and talked and acted like an Alpha, but inside him coursed the traitorous hormones of an Omega. 

There was no way for their Beta housemates to know the difference. Not unless they were told. 

But Izzy knew. And he had a suspicion that Axl knew exactly _how_ Izzy knew. 

Which meant Axl now knew Izzy was an Alpha, too.

Izzy took one more deep, diaphragmatic breath, and started the long descent back to the garage to inform their fellow bandmates about Axl’s unfortunate food poisoning incident.

It was believable enough, considering breakfast had been a variety of doggie bags a waitress friend had snagged for them. So what the hell, right?


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** “Listen up, there’s gonna be a change of living arrangements around here.”

“Listen up, there’s gonna be a change of living arrangements around here.”

Three sleep-starved faces glanced up bleakly from their cereal bowls. Breakfast was Lucky Charms, courtesy of Steven’s masterful five-finger discount (“If you sneak it out of the boxes, you can fit three or four bags under your coat!”). It was five a.m., and nobody had been to bed yet. 

Well, maybe Axl had. He had never returned to last night’s practice.

Izzy felt the exhaustion into his soul, but he somehow doubted he was going to fall asleep for awhile.

“What changes?” Slash demanded. “Why?”

“You’re gonna move in with Stevie.”

Steven looked up from his magically delicious meal, his eyes giant circles of offense.

“That’s not fair, I won the poker game.”

“I know,” Izzy said. “We’ll make it up to you somehow.”

“Well, why does Axl get to have his own room?”

“It’s just--” Izzy began, but Slash interrupted him.

“Hey, wait a second,” he said to Steven, “I’m not a fucking axe murderer, what’s with the tone?”

“I don’t have a tone.”

“We used to share fucking underwear, and now you’re mad about sharing a room?”

“You shared underwear?” Duff said, his mouth full of half-chewed cereal.

“I didn’t say I was _mad_\--”

For a brief moment, Izzy thought the conversation might derail long enough for them to forget why it started, at least until a bit later, after a little sleep, when everyone was in a better mood. But it was Duff, the fucker, who brought it back around.

“So why _does_ Axl get his own room?”

“He’s just… going through a hard time right now. It might be easier for everyone if he had some space.”

“Cry me a fucking river,” Slash said. “We all got our problems. I don’t wanna move in with Stevie, he fucking snores.”

“Look, I’ll figure out a way to make it up to both of you, okay? It’s important. And it needs to happen, so don’t make it difficult.”

Eyes narrowing, Slash said, “Why’s this your problem? What’s in it for you?”

_he knows, somehow he knows_

_get a hold on yourself, he doesn’t fucking know_

_how could he fucking know_

Izzy puffed himself up into his most authoritative posture, ignoring the quiver that was snaking through him, the fear of discovery. “Keeping peace in this fucking band, for starters, which seems to be my fucking job, right?”

Slash rolled his eyes, and drank the milk out of his bowl. Standing, he said, “Am I allowed to intrude on His Highness for now, at least, or should I go sleep in the front yard?”

“Bunk with Duff, I’ll sleep on the couch. We’ll move your shit when we get up.”

“Fine,” Slash said, and retreated from the kitchen, rubbing the back of his neck in the way he always did when he was thirty seconds from sleep. Izzy had a feeling they would have this debate all over again when Slash woke up, and that it would probably require some kind of bribery or blackmail to get the man to concede again when he was well-rested. 

Izzy was rattled back to the moment by the sound of Duff’s spoon dropping into his bowl. “I guess I’ll turn in, too,” the other man said. But there was nothing casual about it. He was looking directly into Izzy’s eyes as he stood up, and was almost to the kitchen doorway before he broke the stare. 

Trying to shake the sinking sensation from his body enough to feel at least a modicum of the sleepiness he was going to need to get any rest at all, Izzy turned to Steven. 

“Well?” he said, unable to stop himself. “You gonna do some more complaining too?”

Steven scooted his chair back noisily and stood up. “I’m gonna get some more cereal. I got _five_ bags of it this time, did I tell you?”

\----------------------------------------

Izzy lay sleepless-- as predicted-- on the pull-out sofa. No one ever bothered pulling out the pull-out sofa because the bed part was even more hideously uncomfortable for sleeping than the sofa part, and it also had a weird smell. Like the previous owner had spilled a lot of liquid in the mattress and then folded the thing up without letting it dry. Since it only smelled like mildew and not piss, they had taken the landlady up on her offer to leave it in the house when they moved in.

The expressions on the guys’ faces paraded through Izzy’s untired brain, his body tensing with every memory of it, with every one of their annoyed and suspicious words that rang in his ears. 

_what’s in it for you_

A sudden realization sent a jolt of something soft and painful straight into his guts, something like commiserating with someone, but much, much more intense. The sense of fear and paranoia he felt right then, remembering his friends’ faces and words, was so small compared to what Axl must have felt every time he had to go on stage, knowing a heat was near; every time he had to interact with his friends, pretending to be someone he wasn’t; every goddamn day. 

There was one beacon of light, though: Axl’s unpredictability was a godsend. A curse, but a godsend. The only thing Izzy could come up with, to explain the man’s sudden need for solitude, was for Axl to feign mental illness. It didn’t have to be complicated; he knew Axl’s inky-black sense of humor, and could picture the man studying the fucking DSM and faking awful stuff for shits and giggles. Now that he would have an accomplice.

The simpler the better, Izzy decided, and he would just have to make sure Axl played along. It shouldn’t be too hard to play the part of the tortured artist, careening slightly off the rails. Who occasionally needs time alone, sometimes with little to no warning. 

_why_ does _Axl get his own room?_

“Because I said so,” Izzy murmured to himself. He was an Alpha, after all. Even if he tried really fucking hard to keep that shit to himself.

\----------------------------------------

Axl lay awake in his bed and stared at the empty bed on the opposite side of the room. Maybe Slash had passed out on the couch again, or maybe he hit up the neighbor chick for a piece of ass.

_maybe Izzy told them_

Axl didn’t know why the thought popped into his head. It was stupid. Izzy wasn’t gonna say a word, and not just because Axl had threatened his life. 

Which was another reason Axl hadn’t slept yet. Who the fuck spontaneously threatens their best friend’s life?

It was too much. All of it. Too much to think about. Axl needed a shot or ten of whatever booze they had in the house (the rent didn’t always get paid, and neither did the electric, but by god, there was always booze in the house). But attaining the booze would require leaving the bedroom, and Axl wasn’t sure he was ready to do that yet. He had already taken a piss in an empty Coke bottle, making minimal mess of things, and he had somewhat convinced himself he wasn’t hungry. But Christ, was he thirsty, and most specifically for something hard enough to take care of his insomnia problem. 

He couldn’t stay in his bedroom forever. 

Dragging himself to his feet, he approached the door in the way he did when Slash was in there and sleeping-- avoiding all the noisy parts of the floor. Not that Slash was a light sleeper, but Axl was used to moving around quietly when he wanted to. Quietness was one’s only privacy when growing up in a small house full of assholes.

He cracked the door just wide enough to press an eye up to, and looked out. There was nobody in his line of sight, and the house looked dead. The only sound was the radio in the living room that nobody ever turned off, that was currently playing a staticky combination of a commercial on one station, and “Day Tripper” by the Beatles on another.

Axl slipped from the bedroom and descended the stairs, avoiding the noisy parts, as he had in his room. A breath he hadn’t realized he was holding abruptly exhaled when he reached the bottom in total silence. The kitchen (and its trove of liquor) was so close now, and--

_shit_. There was a foot hanging over the arm of the couch. From Axl’s angle, he couldn’t tell whose foot it was, but it didn’t matter. There was no way he was going to be able to make it across the downstairs without potentially having to answer fucking questions.

Then again, what the hell was he going to do? Stay in that room until he died? Let them bust down the door when the smell alerted them to his demise?

“Fuck this,” Axl said out loud, and stomped through the living room as hard as he could with bare feet. 

A head popped up from the couch.

“Hey,” Izzy said. He was squinting, like his eyelids had been closed and accustomed to the dark, but his eyes were clear and intense. He was fully awake.

“I’m just getting a drink,” Axl said, and moved past him, disappearing into the kitchen as fast as he could. 

It didn’t matter, because within five seconds, Izzy was standing in the kitchen with him.

“I made arrangements,” the other man was saying. “Slash is moving in with Stevie.”

Axl looked up from the cupboard under the sink where they kept their booze and rat traps. 

“Why?”

“So you can have your own bedroom.”

“Yeah, but why?” Axl said again, a strange unease, nameless and growing, in his belly. He stood up with a half-drank bottle of cheap bodega wine. 

“Jesus Christ,” Izzy said. “For privacy, dumbass.”

For a full minute, maybe more, Axl stood before him, his hand wrapped around the neck of the wine bottle, feeling its heft beneath his fingers. Thinking. The small hairs lifting all over his body. Finally, in as much voice as he could muster, he said, 

“I don’t want it.”

Izzy looked like someone had slapped him full in the face. “_What?_ he demanded. “Are you shitting me right now?”

“No,” Axl said, feeling his ass pressing against the edge of the counter. He hadn’t even realized he was backing up. “I never told you I wanted it.”

“I know that, I just-- I just thought it would be easier for you.”

Izzy’s voice was getting higher, exasperated. The way it always did right before he blew up and stormed out of a room. 

_hurry up and storm out_

Taking a step forward, Izzy said, “I know it’s not a great solution, but what the fuck, man? I’m putting my ass on the line.”

Axl swung the bottle up and held it in front of him as a weapon. “Back off,” he said. 

“Jesus, Ax,” Izzy said, his eyes springing wide.

“I told myself when I was ten that I was _not_ a fucking Omega,” Axl hissed. 

“I didn’t tell them anything! If you’d let me talk--”

“I will not _live_ like a fucking Omega, and I will not _do_ Omega things.”

“Axl, I didn’t say anything to them, they have no idea--”

“And I will cut my own fucking throat before I let anyone else do it to me.”

Izzy’s face went blank, processing the statement. 

Then he backed away a step. 

And another.

“Good fucking Christ, Ax,” he said. The blankness of his face began twisting into something unrecognizable, something Axl had never seen before on the man. Something painful and foreign. 

“I don’t want _any_ of this,” Axl said, intending for it to be a period at the end of his declaration, but it sounded weaker, and he immediately wished he could take it back.

“I’m not trying to… _be with_ you,” Izzy said. “I’m not that person.”

“I know you’re an Alpha, I can smell it, and I’m not a fucking idiot.”

“I am, but I know myself,” Izzy insisted. “I don’t lose my shit.”

“So far,” Axl said. 

They stood in silence until Axl got tired of holding the bottle of wine up in front of him, and let his arm sag. 

“I’m gonna have a drink,” he sighed. “You want one?”


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** The image of Axl’s hair reappeared behind his eyelids, this time wrapped around Izzy’s fist as he pushed the man over the couch and raked his pants down to his thighs.

There was no official word for it.

No medical jargon, no textbook terminology. On the street, they called it the “yes”, as in, You’re Effin Screwed. 

_ha ha_

Izzy watched Axl’s hair, hanging in damp, limp strings, as it dangled above the yellow legal pad the man wrote words on. Axl always came back from his disappearances freshly showered, scrubbed exceptionally clean. Izzy had always assumed it was something mental, obsessive-compulsive, maybe. 

Maybe it was. But it was more than that.

Funny, it used to bother Izzy there was no official word for the _yes_. Now it didn’t bother him a bit. There was no way he would be using it in conversation anyway.

There was a knot in his stomach, right behind his belly button, in his bowels, like he might get the shits at any moment, or he might puke. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. 

Axl glanced up from what he was writing, and caught Izzy’s eyes. 

_I will not_ do _Omega things_

A small, exhausted smile graced his pretty lips and then faded into nothing as he resumed attention over his notebook.

The knot in Izzy’s guts deepened.

The others had given in to the new and improved living arrangements. Axl had played the part of the mentally burnt ghoul very well, and Izzy had assured them all that it was temporary, and that he would think of something to reward them all for their cooperation. Everything had worked out fine, except

_what’s in it for you?_

the memory of the scent was lingering behind Izzy’s sinuses like some cruel ghost. 

Axl stood and brought the notebook over to where Izzy was seated with his guitar deep in the end of the couch. He remained at least six feet away from actually making contact, and tossed the legal pad in the general direction of Izzy’s lap.

“What do you think?” he asked. 

The man was keeping his distance. Izzy shouldn’t have cared. Been neutral at least; at most, felt sympathy. Instead, there was a feeling akin to hurt rising in his esophagus that he couldn’t quite put a name on. It was thicker than hurt, and hotter.

Betrayal, almost. Fucking ridiculous.

Right?

“I’ll read it in a bit.”

“Okay.”

Axl turned and left. Went upstairs and disappeared into the bedroom that was now his and only his. It even had a working lock now.

_what do you think?_

_turn around, I’ll fucking show you what I think_

Fingers deadening the strings, Izzy clamped his eyes shut and struggled for breath. What the _fuck_\--

The image of Axl’s hair reappeared behind his eyelids, this time wrapped around Izzy’s fist as he pushed the man over the couch and raked his pants down to his thighs.

Izzy tossed his guitar onto the couch and bolted for the back door, and the fresh(ish) air promised on the other side of it. Outside, he gulped a desperate breath, two, then bent at the waist and vomited into the patch of gravel and dandelions that used to be a flower bed.

_what’s in it for you?_

“Goddammit,” he snarled to himself, wiping the snot and puke from his nose with the back of his hand.

_turn around_

“Jesus…” Izzy moaned, sinking to his knees. A single dandelion, covered in bile, nodded blithely in the breeze before him. 

_I’ll fucking show you what I think_

The image was still there, Axl bent over the couch, Izzy’s fist in his hair, the two of them fucking like animals, not caring if any of the others saw them. _Daring_ the others to see them. To watch them. It was nature, and they _were_ animals. And sooner or later, if they were in the right place at the right time, Alphas and Omegas might very well run across an opposite that they had the potential to actually bond with, not just fuck. That was also nature, though rarer. 

That was the kind of nature that got people disowned by their families, and made them run away from perfect lives, or get put in prison, and it was the kind of nature that got people killed, and made people kill themselves when they couldn’t make things work out.

Or make a man who sat on his knees on a patch of rented yard in the slums, smelling his own vomit on the wind, still pop a hard-on from the visual of fucking his best friend since childhood. Izzy’s face contorted, but he refused to let any tears happen as he opened his pants and jerked himself off to completion into the gravel.

_yes_

\----------------------------------------

It looked like any other dive bar Izzy had ever been to.

He’d heard stories about how to recognize them for what they were, and the first time he had seen this one, when they had taken a wrong turn on the way to a gig, a tingle of interest had lit up his body. He had tucked the information away in his memory, just in case.

Now, standing inside of it, Izzy knew for sure, even though it looked typical enough. There were a couple of pool tables in the deep corner of the place, to his right, with a handful of people playing. Most of them were clearly men, though there was one, a lanky creature with long blonde hair, that Izzy couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was certainly beautiful, whatever it was.

As if on cue, the blonde glanced up and caught Izzy’s gaze. Smiled. Izzy was almost certain it was a man, though he had the pinkest, poutiest lips. 

The stranger crooked a finger for Izzy to approach and Izzy did.

“Hey there,” the guy said. He couldn’t have been older than twenty.

“Hey,” Izzy said.

“Wanna play?” the boy asked, motioning one of the older, rougher men to hand Izzy a cue. 

“Um, I don’t really--” Izzy began, as a man shoved a stick in his hand. The man was twice Izzy’s size, and remained six inches from him as Izzy turned to the boy for an indication of what to do next. 

The boy flicked his chin, letting the man know to back away, and the man did. Izzy wasn’t sure whether he was surprised or not, but he suddenly understood what was happening a whole lot better.

“It’s just a friendly game,” the boy said, peeling off the leather jacket he wore, and tossing it on a chair. “Doesn’t matter how good you are.”

Under the jacket, he wore no shirt, but a leather harness of sorts-- straps that stretched up and over his shoulders like suspenders, connected by cross-members that ran across chest and back. His nipples were concealed by the apparatus, something that Izzy found instantly and inconceivably frustrating. 

Below the waist, the stranger wore leather pants, cut low enough to show pubic hair, and sealed tight to show every detail of the body beneath.

He picked up a chalk and rubbed the end of his cue slowly, deliberately. Smiled again. “Of course… if you don’t like pool, there are other things to do around here. I could show you.”

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

“$72 and change.”

Izzy had no idea why he told the truth about that, because he had a feeling any amount above a fiddler’s fart would have been acceptable. But the boy’s eyes were burning holes into him now, and he was losing his ability to pretend he knew what he was doing.

The boy put his cue down across the table. “I’ll go get ready. It’ll be about a half an hour. Maxie will bring you back when it’s time.”

With that, he disappeared down a short hallway at the back of the bar that veered off into a second hallway. When Izzy craned to see where he went, the guy who had handed him the pool cue pressed a meaty hand to his back, urging him toward a grimy bench against the back wall. 

“Half an hour,” he said.

“Yeah, okay,” Izzy said, sitting in the bench while the guy he presumed was Maxie rejoined the other larger men playing an actual game of pool.

There were no clocks in the place, not that Izzy could see, and Izzy hadn’t brought a watch. Nobody offered him a drink, and every time he bent forward on the bench to glance toward the hallway where the kid whose name he didn’t even know had gone, Maxie gave him a stare-down. 

Finally, when surely hours or fucking nights and days had passed, Izzy cleared his throat and said, “Um, hey.”

Maxie rolled his eyes and heaved a heavy exhale, but he put his stick down. “I’ll go check,” he said.

It was an excruciating few minutes while the other pool-players chuckled in his general direction and didn’t try to hide it.

When Maxie reemerged from the hallway, he waved Izzy over. “C’mon,” he said, and Izzy followed. “Next time, bring a magazine, asshole. It ain’t our job to babysit you.”

Izzy nodded, but since he was behind the man, it went unnoticed.

They passed through the two hallways Izzy had seen, as well as another, all of them painted multiple colors in miscellaneous configurations, as though the building owner had used whatever leftover paints he had on hand to get the job done. Maxie led them up a set of stairs and to an unmarked door. As he looked for the appropriate key on his keyring, Izzy attempted to orient himself within the building. These were the apartments above the bar, which were apparently not being used as apartments anymore after all. 

They entered the unit. The “living room” of the place contained a kitchen table, two chairs, and a box fan. Nothing else existed in the place that was visible from where they stood.

“Sit,” Maxie said.

But Izzy was frozen on the spot. The smell had reached him, faint but unmistakable. 

The boy was somewhere in this unit. In heat. 

He hadn’t been, a half hour ago, while he was downstairs strolling around the pool table, baiting Izzy into the deal. Downstairs, he had had the subtle magnetism of any attractive Omega. But now he was…

“I don’t understand--” Izzy choked. He had known what the place was, and why he came. But this--

This was $72 and change. 

A door to Izzy’s left drew open, and the boy appeared there, stark naked. He crooked a finger again at Izzy, as he had downstairs, his pink lips smiling. Izzy obeyed.

“You need me, Uriel?” Maxie said.

The boy seemed almost startled to realize the bodyguard was still in the room. 

“I don’t think so,” he said. “This one seems harmless.”

\----------------------------------------

“Where’d Izzy go?” Steven said, aiming the remote control at the tv and stabbing random buttons with his finger, to no avail.

“I told you, the batteries are dead,” Duff said.

“I think he said he had a date or something,” Slash offered.

“_Give me that,”_ Duff said, yanking the remote out of Steven’s hand and sticking it under his own ass.

“Hey!”

“You’re driving me crazy.”

“He’s got a date?” Axl asked. A crawling began beneath the muscles of his legs, the way it felt trying to sleep too soon after playing a gig, or drinking too much coffee. 

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“Who’s he got a date with?”

“Man, I don’t know. Why? You look like you saw a fuckin’ ghost.”

Axl rolled his shoulders and took a breath. “It’s nothing. I just thought I… remembered him talking about something. That’s all.”

Slash held Axl’s eyes for a moment longer than Axl felt was necessary, before he began a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with Steven over who was going to steal batteries this time.

Paranoia in multiple shapes and colors converged on Axl’s mind. It was a stupid thing to say, asking about Izzy’s social plans. 

No, wait.

It wasn’t a stupid thing to say, it was a stupid tone to say it in.

And, apparently, saying it while looking freaked the fuck out.

_jesus, I’m losing it already_

_snap the fuck out of it_

Nobody knew a goddamn thing. Except Izzy. Who was currently somewhere. With…

someone?

The crawling of muscles again. And something that felt like betrayal rising in his esophagus. 

Fucking ridiculous.


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** It really didn’t matter, did it? Izzy didn’t answer to Axl, or to anyone. They weren’t together, they weren’t a pair, they weren’t fucking, they weren’t bonded. They were just a couple of musicians who shared a fucking roof over their heads.

Izzy was barely finished. Still breathing hard, his dick still aching for more, while the Omega stood from the bed and began to pull his pants on.

Surely this wasn’t how it was done?

“That’s it?” Izzy said. “We’re just-- that’s it?”

Uriel was fastening the straps of his leather halter together. “This your first time?”

A rush of flame overtook Izzy’s face. 

“No. Well--”

“Look,” the boy said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We get first-timers all the time. It’s not a sin.”

“Yeah, but--”

This time, Uriel waited for Izzy to finish the thought, but Izzy had no idea how to finish it. 

Finally, the boy said, “Let me guess, you caught hormones for someone you weren’t supposed to, and you needed a stranger to take it out on.”

“No! I mean. No.”

Uriel smiled. “You think this is my first week on the job, or what? I know some shit. Who is it? Brother-in-law? Coworker?”

Izzy sighed, but remained silent this time.

Standing, the boy said, “Hey, since you’re new, and I feel really fucking sorry for you right now, I’m gonna explain a few things before you give me your $72 and get the fuck out.” He gave a charming smile as though he was only joking, but Izzy had a feeling he wasn’t. Not in the slightest. The boy continued, “Guys like me use shots to heat up for clients. It’s illegal, and it’ll probably blow up my heart before I’m 25, but hey, maybe I’ll marry money before then, right? Fucking someone in a real heat is gonna be way better. For both of you. Especially if you’re bonded. So don’t think what happened here is anything like the real thing, cuz it’s not.”

Izzy stood up, preparing to wrestle his hard-on back into his pants, but realized his dick was already limp. He zipped up and pulled the money out of his pocket.

“This is the electric bill,” he mumbled, handing it over.

He wasn’t sure if he expected the boy to take pity on him or not. 

Then again, he was doing business with a guy who was literally putting his life on the line for a slap and tickle, so $72 was probably cheating him.

Uriel took the money, and Izzy walked home. A bus fare was more than the change he had left in his pocket.

\----------------------------------------

It was after 2am by the time he got home, and though he prayed hard to a god he only marginally believed in that everyone would be in bed when he arrived, he could hear the tumult of their instruments a block away. Only Axl’s vocals were missing from the commotion, and Izzy wondered if that meant the man was just working on his lyrics-- and _fuck_ Izzy still hadn’t read the lyrics-- or if Axl was hiding out in his room again.

Or worse, sitting on the front porch steps, smoking a cigarette. 

Izzy stopped in mid-stride half a block away from the house and from _him_, wondering if it was too late to turn around and…

Fuck, who knew? Izzy didn’t have many friends here in L.A., a condition he’d purposely cultivated for himself. Having friends in a place like L.A. was a neverending merry-go-round of getting hit up for favors and then dumped. Izzy had no use for it. Most days.

Tonight, though, it could have come in handy to know even _one_ fucking person to call up and crash on their couch.

“Fuck are you doing?” Axl called out, jarring Izzy out of his reverie.

“Nothing.”

“Why the fuck you just stop in the middle of the sidewalk?”

“I-- I thought I saw a… dog. Or something…”

Axl stood up and chucked his cigarette out into the grass. “Are you high?”

Bitter resignation finally overtaking him, Izzy scuffed the last half a block toward the house, and picked his way up the shitty broken-up concrete block path toward the porch. Where Axl made a point of hindering his passage.

“Where’d you go tonight?” he asked.

Anger. Instant and red, pulsing in Izzy’s head. It was almost foreign to him, to feel it-- he hardly ever had to. But the phantoms of the other men’s dissent, and of handing over the electric bill money he’d been entrusted with to a pretty little whore for a twenty second fuck, were growing fiercer by the moment inside his skull. 

“What makes the difference?” he said, pulling himself up straight for the first time since he’d spotted Axl on the porch. He only had an inch or two of height on the other man, but it meant something. The posture. It was an Alpha posture, and it was something Izzy had used on occasion his entire life to get his way among the Betas while he was living as one. It was pure intimidation, and he knew it, and part of him felt terrible shifting into intimidation mode with Axl, when things were so raw between them, and because hardly any of his anger was Axl’s fault. But part of him was--

“Slash said you had a date,” Axl said, his voice a bit softer.

_\--titillated--_

“Maybe I did. Can you let me inside now?”

“Who was it?”

“None of your business.”

“You smell like him.”

It hit Izzy like a punch in the throat. “_What?”_

“Whatever Omega you were fucking, I can smell him on you.”

Izzy took a step back, shrinking a little. “You’re making that up.”

But he could tell by the way the other man’s jaw was set that it was not a lie. 

It really didn’t matter, did it? Izzy didn’t answer to Axl, or to anyone. They weren’t together, they weren’t a pair, they weren’t fucking, they weren’t bonded. They were just a couple of musicians who shared a fucking roof over their heads.

“Who is it?”

A surprised laugh came out of Izzy and it sounded halfway insane to his own ears. 

“Let me in the house.”

“Who the fuck is it?”

Adrenaline ignited every muscle fiber in Izzy’s body, and he tensed for a blow-- or to deliver one.

“Get the fuck out of my way, or I’m gonna fucking knock you out.”

And though it shouldn’t have been a surprise to him, in that moment of operating from Alpha headspace, it somehow was: Axl drew his own body up straight and unyielding. Took a step in closer.

“I fucking beg you to try.”

_I’ll fucking show you what I think_

The two impulses-- the rage, and the sheer _coveting_\-- intertwined deep inside his belly into an unholy Thing for just a fraction of a moment before they blessedly imploded, but it was all it took. Izzy took a stumbling step backwards, then another, as if physically shoved.

Holding the back of his hand to his mouth to fend off either the urge to vomit or bawl, or both, he said, “I went to a fucking hooker, I had to.”

For awhile there was no response. Thirty seconds, a minute into the silence, Izzy began to think that Axl was testing him somehow, waiting for more in order to catch him in some untruth. But then, finally, the other man said, 

“You had to.”

He wanted to know why. 

He already knew why. 

_Fuck_ he already knew why, Izzy could tell by the way he said it--

“Yeah, I had to, man.”

Silence again. And then,

“I’ve been thinking about something. I think I’m gonna stop doing the shots.”

Izzy’s head snapped up. “_What?”_

“Yeah,” Axl said, digging a crumpled half-pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket and lighting one up. “You want one?” he asked. 

“No, I don’t want a fucking cigarette,” Izzy said. “What the fuck do you mean you’re gonna stop doing the shots?”

Axl shrugged. “I don’t like them. I can’t write well when that shit’s in me and for a few days after. I’m getting to where I only have a few good days a month scattered here and there. It’s bullshit.”

Izzy closed his eyes, trying not to let his mind tune out the utter nonsense he was hearing. 

“The doctor says if I stop doing it, then I’ll only… have problems a day or two a month.”

Shaking his head, Izzy opened his eyes and nailed Axl with a glare. Maybe the other man _didn’t_ realize what had happened. Why Izzy had had to seek the services of a professional. Was it possible Axl was still oblivious? 

“Axl, I don’t think you understand--” 

“I understand just fine,” Axl said. “Now that you know for sure I’m an Omega, you wanna fuck me. But that’s why you gave me my own room, right? With the lock and all?”

Izzy could think of at least two ways to interpret that question, and both of them were bad on him.

Both of them were also a little bit true, if he was being honest with himself.

“I’m not a terrible person. Am I?”

“Why?”

“I spent our electric bill money on the hooker.”

Axl sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Ooo, that’s bad.”

Feeling his shoulders sag, Izzy said, “What the fuck am I gonna do?”

Tossing his half-smoked cigarette away, Axl said, “It’s not my problem, so I don’t care. But if you figure it out, I’ll be in my private suite with the door locked.”

Then he smiled that asshole smile of his, and turned to walk back into the house. But there was something in the smile that lit up Izzy’s body all over again, and he knew in the marrow of his bones that Axl had meant that something to be there in the smile. And he meant there to be something in the way he glanced back to see if Izzy was following him into the house.

He meant _it_. He wanted it.

He _wanted_ it.

Right?

Izzy watched Axl disappear through the front door of the house they shared with three other men whose names he couldn’t recall. He thought about the fallen angel Uriel, whose magnetism was so intense but would always pale in comparison to that of a bonding partner; he thought about the way Axl smelled when the shot hadn’t taken full effect yet. And he wondered what that would be like a hundredfold, when there were no more shots. 

He allowed himself to wonder what it would be like. Just for a moment, he allowed it, and it stole his breath.


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** Izzy nodded, pretending to follow the other man’s train of thought. He knew, somewhere in the frontal lobe of his brain where rational things happened, that the gauze wrapped around Axl’s arm represented a sensible, prudent course of action from a person who was often the last person to expect sensible and prudent things from. 
> 
> But in some deeper part of Izzy’s brain, the lizard part maybe, it was the sound of the only door in the house with a lock on it creaking open.

September 26th came and went, and the lights were still on.

It was eleven days past Izzy’s encounter with the prostitute, and seven days past the date when the electric was to be disconnected. Each of those seven days, Izzy had waited for the promised darkness, ticked away the hours while the acid ate a hole in his stomach. No electric meant no practice, and it meant trying to scrape up enough money to pay two months’ worth of bills at once, plus reconnect and late fees. It was a death sentence to a band that could barely eat most weeks, and could barely get along some days, even without knowing their older brother figure had dumped the precious electric bill money on a quick fuck.

Except the lights were still on. And their shitty secondhand amps still worked just fine (how they sounded was a matter of opinion). 

In fact, the only room in the house that didn’t have a light on was Axl’s. The gap under the door was dark as Izzy approached it, even though it was only 7pm. Axl woke up at 2 or 3pm most days, so 7 was early afternoon to the guy. No way was he asleep yet.

Izzy tapped on the door very lightly just in case. 

“Fuck off,” came the answer.

“Hey, it’s Izzy, can I come in?”

“What part of ‘fuck off’ don’t you understand?”

Axl’s voice sounded groggy and low-- lower than normal. Not exactly like he had been sleeping, but more like he was sick. Izzy reached for the doorknob out of instinct, but stopped himself. There were a hundred reasons he didn’t need to be letting himself into Axl’s bedroom anymore, not the least of which was because it was likely to be locked now anyway, and trying the knob would be an exercise in making himself look stupid.

“Are you okay?” he said, his hand still hovering, but not touching, the knob.

“My head is fucking killing me.”

“Let me in.”

“It ain’t locked.”

Izzy dropped his waiting hand on the knob a little harder than he expected and pushed inside. Axl wasn’t exactly _in_ bed, but on top of it, on top of the messed up blankets, with a forearm thrown over his eyes. 

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Izzy opened his mouth to say _are you okay?_ again, before thinking better of it. Instead, he said, “Um-- is there anything I can do? Do you need aspirin or something?”

“I already took half the bottle. My ears are fucking ringing now too.” Axl dragged the arm off his face and let his head roll in Izzy’s direction. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I was just… Um. The electric.”

“What about it?”

“It’s still on.”

“Oh yeah, your _date.”_

Smirking a little, Axl put the arm back over his face, and left Izzy to sit there with the tension in his body building like a slingshot being cranked back.

“Forget the fucking hooker, will you? Why is the electric still on?”

“Did you call ‘em and ask?”

“No, I don’t want to bring it to their attention in case it’s a mistake.”

Axl snorted softly and pulled himself upright in the bed. “You are such a fucking pussy, man.”

“What?”

“I got it paid. Two months, actually. It’s done, don’t worry about it.”

“_What?_ Shit, where’d you get the money? You didn’t do anything stupid, did you?”

Axl squeezed the bridge of his nose, then rubbed the pads of his fingers out across his forehead. “Define ‘stupid’.”

“Oh god,” Izzy said, his body temperature tanking, even though his brain was shutting out his immediate grasp of any examples of the _stupid_ things Axl might have gotten up to. 

“Fuck off,” Axl said. “I’m not a _total_ idiot. Mrs. Montgomery gave it to me.”

“The fuckin landlady? Why w--”

The sentence stopped of its own accord, and Axl was smirking again.

“Turns out I’m the sexy one. Told you motherfuckers.”

“You didn’t--”

“You gonna pass judgment, asshole? All things considered?”

Izzy felt himself deflate a little, so he stood up to counteract it. Paced a little. 

“Is that why you don’t feel good? Are you okay?”

To his surprise, Axl laughed. “Are you stupid? Do I have a fucking migraine because I fucked a sixty year-old lady, is that what you’re asking? No, that’s not why my head hurts, and honestly it wasn’t bad, she fucking knows some shit.”

Stopping in mid-pace, Izzy turned around. “I wanna make it up to you.” 

Axl laughed again. “Oh, the way you made it up to the others for switching our rooms around? No thanks.”

Sinking back down onto the edge of the bed, Izzy groaned in defeat. “God_damn_, I _am_ a fucking idiot, aren’t I?”

“You’re okay, you make a good Beta. You just suck as an Alpha.”

A flare of impotent anger bloomed in Izzy’s chest, but by the time he opened his mouth to respond, he realized the other man was smiling. So he said,

“Tell me the truth. Why are you sick? Is it stress? Did I cause it?”

Axl heaved a gigantic sigh. “Jesus, can’t a person have a headache for no reason?”

“No.”

“Fine.” Pulling up his tee shirt sleeve, Axl revealed his upper arm to be neatly wrapped in several layers of gauze. “This is why.”

Just as with the door knob, Izzy restrained an urge to reach out and touch the bandage. “What happened?”

“I got the stick, and it’s fucking with me. That’s why my head hurts. Happy?”

Izzy’s mind swam, attempting to grasp the information. “You got--”

“It’s fucking birth control, numb nuts.”

“I know that,” Izzy said, trying to measure his words to make sure they made sense as they left his mouth. “I know that much.”

“So why do you look like I just punched you in the face?”

“I’m just-- I… I don’t know. You said you’d never… do that--” 

Axl shrugged. “Shit happens, Iz. I ain’t planning on it, but I’ll fucking kill myself before I’d have a kid, you know? No kid deserves me as a parent.”

Izzy nodded, pretending to follow the other man’s train of thought. He knew, somewhere in the frontal lobe of his brain where rational things happened, that the gauze wrapped around Axl’s arm represented a sensible, prudent course of action from a person who was often the last person to expect sensible and prudent things from. 

But in some deeper part of Izzy’s brain, the lizard part maybe, it was the sound of the only door in the house with a lock on it creaking open. 

His cock twitched with the blood creeping into it.

“Have you--” he said, trying to keep his voice level and impassive, “you know--” 

“What?”

Izzy waved his hand a bit. “You know.” 

When Axl just stared at him, waiting for more information, Izzy said, “I mean, you did stop doing…”

Again, Axl waited. An eternity of horrible silence before he finally said, “God, you are _such_ a pussy!”

“What?!”

“For fuck’s sake! They’re just hormone shots. And it’s called a heat. That’s what you’re asking, right? If I’ve been in a heat yet?”

“I’m trying to be polite!”

“You’re being a pussy! And no, I haven’t been in a heat yet, you’d fucking know it if I had, wouldn’t you?”

The sudden thought of it, and the abrasive way it came out of Axl’s mouth, with no degree of timidity whatsoever, sent another wave of blood into Izzy’s dick. He shifted into a more comfortable position.

Axl continued, “This--” (he held out his arm again) “apparently fucks with the heats. They said it might be a little longer before the first one comes on.”

Izzy nodded like he was actually listening.

“Meanwhile my head and my fucking tits are killing me.”

Izzy was listening.

“What?”

“Yeah, sorry, but since you’re the only one I can tell, I’m gonna bitch about shit.”

“Yeah, no, I mean… That’s fine, I don’t care, that’s--”

_dear god, get out of this room_

“But I already wrote a little today before my fucking head exploded, so I guess it’s working, huh?”

“Um, yeah. It sounds that way.”

Axl tilted his head a little to the side, measuring Izzy up. Or so it seemed. “Just say it.”

Whatever it was that Izzy was expecting from Axl at that moment, it wasn’t that. His head jerked up, and he hadn’t realized he had allowed himself to look away. “Say what?”

“Whatever it is you’re wanting to say. Or ask.”

“Um… I don’t know.”

“Fuck off. You know exactly what you wanna say.”

“Okay…” Izzy said, taking a deep breath, then exhaling it through his nose. Inhaling again. “Why do your tits hurt?”

“This,” Axl said, holding up his arm, yet again. “And I’m probably gonna heat soon.”

“But-- _why?_”

“You had sex ed in school, didn’t you?”

“Did _you_ fucking pay attention in school?”

Axl pointed to himself with both hands. “Undercover Omega here. I _had_ to fucking pay attention to that shit.”

They sat there for another minute, neither speaking. Izzy considered making some excuse to leave, but he remembered his hard-on, and how it was only the way he was sitting that allowed him to disguise it. He also didn’t want to leave. 

Finally, he said, “What’s it like?”

“Which part?”

The question was like an upper cut. Izzy had meant a heat, purely physical things, out of purely salacious curiosity, and now?

He had no idea.

“Any of it.”

Axl’s words were measured. “I’ve only had one heat in my life, back when I was a kid. It sucks.” He laughed, but it was a bitter thing, devoid of humor. “Imagine the horniest you’ve ever been in your whole fucking life, but it doesn’t go away for a solid 48 hours, no matter what you do to yourself. I guess it’s less horrible if you got a fuck buddy, but it still ain’t fun. It’s like dying of thirst in the desert and someone’s handing you fucking teaspoons of water. It might keep you alive, but it’s gonna be fucking terrible.”

_jesus_

“I think I need to go,” Izzy said, standing again.

Groaning, Axl reclined against the headboard and threw a forearm over his eyes again. “You’re gonna have to figure out how to deal with this shit. It’s only gonna get worse.”

“Why can’t you just stay on the fucking shots, you asshole?”

“Because I’m tired of what my fucking life is when I’m on them. And because I’m dumb enough to trust you not to be a dickface about the whole thing.”

“Well,” Izzy said, standing to leave. “Maybe you shouldn’t trust me. How about that?”

“You’re already on the ropes?” Axl said, chuckling. “Boy, I’ll bet that hooker really had a great time with you.”

“This isn’t fucking funny, man,” Izzy said, the desperation in his voice sending it high-pitched. For a moment, he was convinced the growing nausea in him was an oncoming bout of vomit, but instead, it was words. Awful fucking words, that he didn’t mean to say, but lurched out of him anyway: “I have this-- _thought_\-- in my head, where I fucking just rape you, and it keeps coming back--” 

To his shock, Axl uncovered his eyes, but seemed unmoved by the confession. 

“Join the club,” he said.

It pummeled Izzy directly in the chest, and he took a few steps backwards until his palms found the door. 

Axl continued, “If you try it, I’ll kill you and cut you into a thousand fucking pieces. But I’m telling you, you really should have listened in sex ed. You think you’re the first guy this shit was ever hard for? Like I said, don’t be a fucking dickface about it, and things’ll be fine, right?”

\----------------------------------------

It was exactly 12:45 pm the following day, when the entire house was silent, except for the very faint snoring of Duff in the next bed, and the distant, staticky radio in the kitchen, that Izzy woke from a sound sleep to the smell of Axl’s heat. 


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** “I wanna know what’s going on,” Slash said, refusing to flinch. “We all fucking do.”

_In the dream, Axl was above him._

Not yet, _he was saying, his voice gentle and sing-songy._ Not yet.

_The light through the tattered blinds streamed in onto his naked body, catching the sheen of sweat that covered his skin._

I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

_Axl smiled and continued to roll his hips against Izzy’s._

Not yet.

_Izzy pushed himself up into the other man’s rhythm, harder, until Axl indulged the unspoken request, bouncing himself against Izzy’s body. The man’s eyes fell closed, and his lips opened in a shameless moan._

Izzy’s eyes snapped open full seconds before his brain became fully aware of what was happening. The ancient plaster ceiling above him, stained with a history of roof leaks past. No glossy, sweaty, copper hair shivering with the movements of the pretty shoulders it cascaded around. 

Bright early afternoon sunlight _was_ pouring in through the barely-existent blinds, but it was landing across Duff in the next bed, and across Izzy’s own body-- alone, and nursing the most ridiculously throbbing hard-on he could imagine having without actually blowing his load right there in his boxer shorts. 

And there was the smell.

It was the smell that had awakened him; the smell that had induced the dream, and the chemical rush inside him that was scrambling him into confusion and lust.

It wasn’t even a _smell_ per se-- not like a perfume had a smell, or a food. More like a knowing in the space behind his nose, deep in his sinuses. Izzy was sure there was some scientific explanation for it-- what it was, and why Alphas could smell it while a Beta could go on snoring peacefully, blissfully unaware-- but obviously he had missed those lessons.

Fuck Axl and his superiority complex. Just because he knew details about being an Omega? Why the fuck would Izzy know about being an Omega? Fuck Axl…

Izzy shoved his shorts down and jerked at his cock, the friction painful enough to almost bring tears to his eyes, but not to diminish the hardness beneath his fingers. He bit his fist to keep from waking up Duff as he came.

Then he used his cum to make the next round a little less painful, though it wasn’t enough to fully slicken the aggression of his own hand. And when he came again, it was just as wet as the first one, and just as intense, the fluid fountaining out of him like he hadn’t come in months. 

This time a moan choked out of him before he could stop it, and he whipped his head around to check on Duff. Thank god, the man was still sound asleep.

Grabbing a handful of bedsheet, Izzy wiped himself down as best as he could, and stood up on wobbling legs. Everything in him told him to stay in this room, or hell, leave the house. Pack a bag and go stay at the fucking bus station if he had to. 

But instead, he found himself shuffling slowly down the hallway toward Axl’s bedroom.

He couldn’t tell if the smell was growing stronger as he approached or not, because it had already overtaken his entire senses from the moment he breached consciousness. From even before. All he knew was that his knees were becoming progressively weakened by it, and by the time he reached the door, there was a deep shivering in them that made it hard to stand.

He laid his palms against the wood of the door and waited, his heart slamming behind his ribs. There was no point in knocking, because the other man didn’t want him there, and might-- probably _would_ even-- perceive him as an outright threat

_join the club_

Izzy allowed his forehead to sag against the door between his palms. The Thoughts were absolutely abhorrent, and Axl had them, too? 

_like animals_

It had to be terrifying for the other man, living life with a biological mandate to fuck and be fucked, and having no psychological desire to do so. 

And yet, Izzy couldn’t make himself walk away from that door.

He sank to his knees.

A low voice from the other side said, “Fuck off.”

Izzy started. The words came from roughly where he, himself, was sitting. Axl was also sitting on the floor. At the door.

“Are you okay?” Izzy asked softly.

A sarcastic laugh. “No.”

“What can I do to help?”

Another laugh, this one genuine.

Izzy said, “Okay, that was stupid.”

“You could fuck off.”

“Do you really want me to go?” Izzy said, his stomach dropping as he spoke. “I could find somewhere to go for a few days.”

He waited and wished he had had the balls to have never shown up at Axl’s door in the first place. Never to have lain the choice at the other man’s feet. 

But finally, Axl said, “No.”

“No?”

“No. But I need you to put a lock on the bathroom door, too, for me.”

“Okay.”

“And make up some shit to tell the others.”

“Okay.”

Izzy paused for the next instruction, but it never came, so he said, “Do you need me to bring you food?”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

Then quiet again, broken only by the kitchen radio. Izzy told himself to stand up and attend to the things that needed attending to. Be a fucking man and do the things that needed doing, but he couldn’t make himself leave. 

And after a minute, Axl’s fingers emerged from the gap beneath the door. Izzy grasped them tight enough that he knew it hurt and pressed his mouth to the tiny slot of space at the jamb. 

“I wanna come in,” he said.

“I wanna let you,” Axl whispered. “God, I wanna let you--” 

“This is bullshit,” Izzy said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I fucking hate your guts after. You hate me. The band breaks up. Iz, we’re _so close_ to fucking making it--”

“I know…”

“We can’t do this,” Axl said and then, as a period to the end of the declaration, withdrew his hand from beneath the door. 

“Axl--” 

“Please go get a lock for the bathroom. It doesn’t matter what you tell the guys about me, you can tell ‘em I’m seeing aliens for all I care.”

It was done. The opportunity. If there ever had been one. 

Izzy pulled himself up onto his still-shaking legs and, through a force of will he didn’t know existed within him, compelled himself to return to his own bedroom (where Duff still slept, none the wiser that anything more than sleep and gentle dreams had occurred in the interim) to change his clothes so that he could venture out into the regular world and buy another fucking lock.

\----------------------------------------

“What’s up with the lock?” Slash said.

It was 87 degrees, and Izzy was wearing a flannel shirt tied around his waist to hide his neverending hard-on. And whatever this wood was that the bathroom doorframe was made from was the hardest fucking wood on the face of the goddamn planet, and since they did not own a drill to pre-make screw holes, all Izzy had was a motherfucking screwdriver and his upper body strength to try to get these stupid fucking lock screws into this stupid fucking doorframe. 

He was _not_ in the mood to answer questions.

“It’s a fucking bathroom, it needs a lock.”

“I ain’t complaining. I’m just wondering why now.”

Whirling around, Izzy pointed the screwdriver at the other man’s face. “If you ask me one more thing, I’m sinking this in your brain.”

Slash chuckled. “Ya know you’d probably be in a better mood if you weren’t dressed in fucking layers. You rip the ass out of your pants?”

“Yeah. I ripped the ass out of my pants. Go away.”

Rolling his eyes, Slash shifted to the other foot but did not, in fact, go away. He said, “So what’s going on?”

Izzy inspected the screw he was attempting to put into the doorframe, and found he had blunted off the point of it. “Goddammit,” he hissed, and chucked it across the room. It hit the tub wall and bounced, clinking down somewhere behind the toilet. “Cheap ass piece of shit.”

“What’s going on?” Slash said again, and when Izzy looked up to tell him to go fuck himself, he found the man’s arms crossed, his eyes laser-focused on him. 

“Axl asked me to do it. What makes the fucking difference?”

“What’s going on with him?”

“He’s having a bad day, I don’t fucking know.”

“You’re putting a lock on the john cuz Axl’s having a bad day?”

“You know, I wasn’t fucking kidding about putting this screwdriver in your fucking head.”

“I wanna know what’s going on,” Slash said, refusing to flinch. “We all fucking do.”

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means none of this shit makes sense, and you still ain’t explained it to us. I went along with it cuz I figured you’d tell us the truth sooner or later, but shit’s just getting weirder and weirder--”

“I already told you what’s going on--”

“Oh, that shit about Ax’s _nervous breakdown_, I forgot. Yeah, none of us is buying that, by the way. He seems the same as he ever was.”

“He hides shit well.”

“Yeah, he’s hiding shit all right. And so are you.”

“What, then?” Izzy demanded, his spine prickling. “What the fuck are me and Axl conspiring about?”

“You tell me.”

“There’s nothing to fucking tell.”

Finally dropping his arms from their crossed position, Slash roused himself to leave the room. “You’re making it real fucking hard to trust you guys. And that ain’t just me talking, either. Duff and Stevie just didn’t wanna ask.”

Izzy watched him walk out, then turned around and heaved the screwdriver at the tub wall, too. It shattered the tile it struck, before landing unceremoniously in the tub.

\----------------------------------------

“You didn’t get the lock on.”

Izzy sat outside Axl’s door, watching the gap and hoping for the other man’s fingers to appear underneath again. The noise of their bandmates practicing without them filled the house and probably most of the neighborhood.

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“What did you tell the others about me?”

Izzy felt a new wave of adrenaline pulse through him-- the millionth that day, for a hundred reasons-- but he was too exhausted to bristle at the feel of it. After his run-in with Slash, he had avoided Duff and Steven as best he could. The cuntface fuckers, talking shit behind his back and too scared to say anything to his face. At least Slash had the balls to confront him, the fucking asshole.

Maybe he had a little bristle left in him after all.

“Iz?”

“They haven’t asked. I didn’t bother.”

“Oh.”

“I’m gonna go away for a few days, okay?”

There was a long quiet, and for a minute, Izzy thought Axl wasn’t going to respond. Then:

“Where you gonna go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you gonna go back to the hooker?”

Izzy hadn’t even thought about availing himself of the boy’s services again. And now that he mulled the idea, he knew that even if he did, it wasn’t going to be worth shit to him. 

Probably better than jerking himself off though.

“I don’t know where I’m gonna go,” he said.

After a pause, Axl said, “Okay,” and it sounded like there might have been tears in his voice. 

It struck daggers of ice into Izzy’s veins. But it could have been his imagination.

He took a breath and put his own hand under the door and waited for contact. Nothing.

“All right, I’m leaving now,” he mumbled, but it was another ten minutes at least before he actually left Axl’s door, and he knew the other man knew it.

\----------------------------------------

Axl paced.

It had taken every bit of willpower in him-- along with some divine intervention, he was sure-- not to touch Izzy’s fucking hand when it had been offered. He, himself, had screwed up earlier, starting that shit. Telling Izzy he wanted him. Fucking hell, what a moron.

He had chain-smoked his way through his remaining cigarettes hours ago, he couldn’t focus enough to read, and he had already whacked off til his dick was sore, and he was only less than six hours into it. There was no fucking way he was going to survive this shit.

This bullshit was for fucking sissies who wanted to be dominated, or at least didn’t mind it. And Axl was emphatically _not_ that guy. Jesus jumping-jack Christ, what a cosmic joke this was, putting him in a body that would gladly have him on his fucking hands and knees for his friend just because their pheromones happened to harmonize. A body whose need to be pillaged was an actual, physical ache deep in his hips. 

The whole thing probably wasn’t worth it. 

He could still write okay most days, even while doing the shots. All right, only _some_ days, and with Izzy’s help, but it was enough. This shit was unacceptable. Especially since Izzy was now completely gone from the house, to who knows where, because of it.

Fuck that, who cared? That was the heat talking.

Who cared if Izzy fucked someone else? Who cared if he didn’t?

Who fucking cared if Izzy put his goddamn motherfucking hand under the door and Axl didn’t touch it when he had the chance?


	7. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** Things get heated, in more ways than one. **CW: Violence, Implications of Rape**. See A/N.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hate creating a summary, instead of just using a line from the story, but in this chapter I had to. Because no matter where I took a line of the story from, it seemed misleading as to what the chapter was about. 
> 
> If you want to avoid the trigger content, you're safe reading the first half of the chapter. Just stop at the -------------- mark.

9:30 pm on a Saturday night, and the house was quiet. Relatively so.

Izzy had returned home a few days prior to find that Axl was back to himself. No scent of yearning hung in the air, though it lingered in the depths of Izzy’s head, a memory turned somehow tangible.

Axl was back to himself, but the others may as well have been strangers. 

Things were cordial enough between them, but that was it. In fact, it was the cordiality that bothered Izzy. Since when were the five of them _polite_ with each other?

He had cornered Axl and expressed the concern, but Axl didn’t seem to think it was anything to worry about. Maybe they were just relieved Izzy had come home, he thought.

Izzy thought Axl was artificially optimistic, having newly survived his heat. The way a person thinks they can take on the world the first normal-ish day after coming through a flu.

And now, it was 9:30 pm on a Saturday night, and there was no band practice in session. Three members of the band had fucked off to a club to watch someone else’s band play. And Izzy and Axl had been pointedly not invited to come along.

Izzy and Axl had _started_ the band. They wrote the songs. Izzy provided the guidance (most of the time, though lately he had done a horrible job at his given role); Axl provided the gunpowder _and_ the fucking spark most days. 

Was it possible to kick them out?

And so Izzy wandered through the quiet-ish house, on his way to nowhere in particular, wishing he didn’t care that much. Because fuck em all anyway.

In the dining room, there was a keyboard on a card table, with a crumbling steamer trunk functioning as a makeshift bench, and that’s where Izzy found Axl, plucking out notes to match something in his head, his bare feet working nonexistent pedals as though he sat at a piano instead of a Casio.

“What’s that?” Izzy asked.

“Just something I started messing around on today,” Axl said, not looking up, his fingers not missing a beat. “I wish we had a real piano.”

“Me too.”

Moving closer into the room, Izzy said, “I read the new lyrics you gave me. They were really good.”

This made Axl’s hands stop. He looked up. “That’s it?”

“Fine, they were fucking great.”

Axl smiled and turned back to the keys. “Okay.”

Izzy closed the distance between them. There was something there. _Something._ Not the smell, necessarily. But there was something.

Strands of Axl’s hair draped in front of his shoulders, shrouding his face, and Izzy wanted to touch those pieces of his hair, wanted to pull them back to reveal the man’s profile. 

He shouldn’t do it, he told himself. But what was the worst that could happen? He’d be told no?

Straddling the trunk, he drew himself in close to Axl’s side. “I think this is the one,” he said. 

There was a tiny twitch of the muscles in the other man’s jaw, and Izzy wasn’t sure if it was tension or a smile attempting to emerge.

“You’re still horny,” Axl said.

“A little.”

“I’m not.”

“I can get you that way.”

Axl’s fingers continued to gambol over the keys, independent of the conversation. “It’s a love song. It’s not the one.”

Izzy reached up and stroked the stray pieces of hair away from Axl’s face, tucked them behind his ear. He wasn’t sure if it surprised him or not that the other man didn’t attempt to stop him.

He didn’t know what it meant, but he took it as an invitation.

Leaning in, Izzy pressed his lips to the newly revealed length of Axl’s neck. He felt, more than heard, an intake of breath, low and sharp, and the man’s hands fell still.

“What are you doing?” Axl asked, his voice soft but matter-of-fact.

“Co-writing.”

“You’re distracting me,” Axl said, and he sounded like the smile had finally broken through.

Izzy found the lower hem of the other man’s tee shirt and slid a hand up beneath it.

“Izzy…”

“Co-writing.”

The little nipples were impossibly hard already when Izzy found them, and he grazed over them, one at a time. Rolled them softly between his fingertips. 

Axl’s entire body stiffened. “You’re gonna make ‘em leak again,” he murmured. 

Izzy popped his lips off the bit of neck he’d been devouring. “They leak?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Let me suck ‘em.”

Axl snorted. “You’re gross,” he said, but he put up no fight as Izzy pulled him from the steamer trunk onto the ratty carpet and pushed his shirt up to his armpits.

His nipples were bright pink, which could have been just his complexion, but to Izzy signaled desperate arousal, and as he descended on one, he had to remind himself to be nice, not to bite, not to--

\--christ, he didn’t even know--

Axl squirmed beneath him, his ribcage thrusting repeatedly toward Izzy’s face in the struggle for breath, and each time, Izzy attempted to swallow him deeper if that was possible, until Axl finally grabbed a hold of his hair and attempted to dislodge him.

“Fuck-- that hurts--”

It took Izzy several seconds to convince his mouth to let go. “Sorry,” he breathed.

When he moved to the other nipple, he tried to keep his lips free from suctioning down, tried to kiss and lick only, no teeth, but a minute into it, Axl began making a whimpering noise that Izzy wouldn’t have imagined could come out of someone with a voice that deep, and he fucking lost it. He latched hard onto the tiny peak, sucking it until he knew it hurt, waited for the other man to push him away again. 

This time Axl clutched the back of Izzy’s neck, his fingertips grinding excruciating imprints into the muscles, but allowed the assault. Every breath he inhaled returned to the air as one of those whimpers. 

And after a few moments or an hour, Izzy didn’t know anymore, a faint sweetness greeted his tongue 

_fuck_

and he bit down again. 

Axl shoved him away but allowed him to immediately return to the first nipple. “Stop biting me,” he hissed, and slapped Izzy upside the head before clutching him close again.

Izzy wanted to pull off and apologize, but this nipple had begun to release, too, and _fuck_ he was gonna come in his fucking pants--

“Oh god,” Axl gasped, “I think I’m gonna come--”

Izzy came instead.

_fuck_

He wasn’t sure if he had bitten down again, or if Axl just got impatient, but suddenly the other man pushed him onto his back and straddled him. Izzy grabbed his hips and pulled him down to him, until he could feel the details of the other man’s cock through both their jeans as they ground themselves together.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck--” Axl panted.

Izzy slipped his hands down the back of the other man’s pants, grasped the curves of his naked ass like he had a fucking right to do it, like he maybe had a right to claim ownership--

Axl’s eyes popped wide. “_Oh--_” he choked, “ohh--” 

His body shook hard, his elbows shivering until he let himself down fully on top of Izzy, and still they bucked desperately against each other.

Izzy wasn’t sure if Axl had three separate climaxes, or if it was one long one with ebbs and flows, but jesus it was hypnotizing, and it pushed Izzy into another one of his own.

But when it was done, it was like a veil had been lifted from Axl’s eyes, and he glanced backward. 

Izzy snatched his hands from the other man’s pants in the hope he wouldn’t be chastised for his brazenness. 

And maybe it was only because of post-orgasm sedation, but Axl didn’t.

Instead he said, “I think the guys probably want us to go find them. See if we care.”

It took Izzy a moment to recover from the mental whiplash, before it fully registered. And once it did, he said, “You’re probably right.”

Goddammit, though. Izzy hated playing the older brother sometimes.

\----------------------------------------

It wasn’t hard to find the others.

As it turned out, they weren’t watching someone else’s band. They were guest-playing in it.

Izzy and Axl had slipped into the club as regular patrons, but by the time they had ordered a couple of beers, a dozen or more people recognized them from playing out at other clubs. It was only a matter of time before the buzz reached the stage. The (female) bartender comped the drinks and sent them on their way.

They picked their way through the crowd carefully, trying not to draw any more attention to themselves. Good god, if they drew attention to themselves here, tonight, Izzy thought, he and Axl might as well pack their fucking bags. Founders or not. 

The thought made Izzy want to return home for that screwdriver he never put up Slash’s nostril. Then he cleared his mind as best he could, took a long pull of his awful, overpriced beer, and tried to let himself listen to his bandmates as if it was his first time hearing them. As if he didn’t want to put all their fucking heads down a pissed-in toilet and flush.

And they were good. Really fucking good. Each of them was ten times better than the rest of the guys on stage put together. It was gonna be the biggest mistake of Izzy’s life to let these guys get away from him. Fuck.

He glanced at Axl to gauge his opinion and found the man glaring at someone across the crowd. 

“The fuck’s going on?”

“That fuckhead over there keeps grinning at me.”

“Who?”

“The fucker in the green jacket.”

The crowd was tight, and every time a body passed through it, it created a surge of motion that readjusted the whole space. Izzy had no clue who Axl was staring down.

“So?” he asked. 

Axl didn’t respond. He continued sipping his beer and squinting off into a darkened corner of the club, where Izzy could see nothing of note.

“All right,” Izzy muttered, then turned his attention back to the stage, and realized that Duff had spotted him. It was impossible to read his expression from where Izzy was, not least of all because Duff’s hair was an electrified shock of bleached fluff that covered most of his face when he was looking down, which he did a lot on stage. 

Izzy made a move to let Axl know, but Axl was still preoccupied with the unknown grinner across the way, and couldn’t have given a shit less that Izzy was trying to get his attention.

At the end of the song, while the crowd was hollering, Duff leaned in to talk in the ear of the singer of the band whose name Izzy thought he might know but couldn’t recall off the top of his head. The singer’s self-congratulatory smile dropped and he scanned the crowd. Stepping back to the mic, he said, “Hey, we’re gonna take a short break, okay?” Then he turned toward Duff and said, “Ten minutes, tops.”

The crowd booed a little, cheered a little, and mostly got over the disappointment and back to their drinks within less than thirty seconds. Drunk people were predictable like that if the band wasn’t that exciting, which made Izzy feel a bit better. The band as a whole just didn’t have it, even if his guys were incredible. 

He watched Duff make rounds to Slash and Steven, having a word in each of their ears. Slash rolled his eyes before pulling his guitar off over his head. Steven shrugged but he, too, scanned the crowd.

Axl was still staring at someone Izzy couldn’t see. 

“I’m gonna go get us more beer,” he said, and began drifting into the crowd. 

Izzy grabbed him by the arm. “Do _not_ start shit with someone, Ax. If we steal their thunder, we’re fucking toast, I have a feeling.”

“I’m not starting anything. Fucker’s staring at _me_, and I wanna know why.”

“Maybe he’s a fucking fan, for fuck’s sake.”

“He ain’t a fan. Not of us. Maybe of them,” Axl said, tipping his chin toward the members of the band whose name Izzy still couldn’t recall for the life of him. 

“Do _not_ start anything,” Izzy said again, knowing he was wasting his fucking breath.

Axl finally looked at him. “I’m just grabbing us a couple of beers.”

“The fuck are you doing here?” Duff said, suddenly behind him, and it grabbed Izzy’s attention just long enough to let Axl go.

“The fuck are _you_ doing here?” Izzy countered. “Going to a show, my fucking ass.”

“We’re at a show,” Slash said.

“So what now? You leaving?” Izzy said. “You joining up with these three-chord dipshits?”

“Maybe.”

“And what? Everything we fucking worked for is gone?”

“I don’t fucking know, Izzy,” Slash said. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” 

The crowd surged again with people passing through it, and someone was shoved, elbow out, into Izzy’s back. It took a gigantic feat of self-control not to take a swing on them, sight unseen. He had to get out of there.

“Can we do this at home? Please?”

“Why?” Steven asked, and the sound of his challenging voice startled Izzy. “That hasn’t gotten us anywhere yet.”

“That’s because you fuckers keep talking behind our backs.”

“_Our_ backs?” Duff said. “See, that’s the problem, right there. Why is there ‘you and him’ and then there’s us?”

“There isn’t ‘me and him’.”

As soon as it left his mouth, he saw it crush what might have been left of the trust in Duff’s eyes. The man nodded.

“I thought you’d say that. Where’d he go, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I think he went to fucking fight some guy in a green jacket for looking hard at him.”

Slash glanced up at the same corner near the stage that Axl had been obsessing over. “That big fucker with the blond hair?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see him. Why?”

“That asshole’s been starting shit with people all night. He’s friends with the fucking bouncers, so they won’t kick his ass out. Tried to start shit with Stevie.”

“What? What happened?”

Steven grimaced. “Fucking told me I was pretty, and did I want to get fucked tonight. Thought I was an Omega cuz my height.”

For a moment, there was only white noise.

The crowd. The recorded music playing during the band’s carefully-timed break. The whoosh of nothingness inside of Izzy’s brain.

And then the pounding of blood in his skull.

His body took off before his mind did, crashing through people in the crowd, male and female alike, knocking drinks and bodies to the floor. The offending corner of the bar contained no blond man in a green jacket. 

_no, no, no_

Izzy pivoted and ran up to the bar, yanking patrons out of the way, barely aware of shoves and drunken fists he caught in return. 

“Hey, stop it!” the bartender yelled.

“Where is he, where’d he go?” Izzy demanded.

“Who?”

“My friend, the redhead.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t-- Hey!”

But Izzy was already gone in another direction, and this time, the crowd parted for him as he ran, hoots and laughter, mingled with gasps and shouts, following after him as he smashed through the bathroom door, only to find a row of mildly surprised drunken faces turn to glance up at him from above the urinals. There was only one stall with a door in the bathroom, and Izzy kicked it in. It was empty.

He wheeled to run out, when one of the bouncers blocked his path. “All right, you’re gonna have to--”

Izzy grabbed the guy by the shirt and shoved him against the hallway wall, opposite the bathroom door. “Where’s your friend in the green coat? Where the fuck is he?”

“Calm down, cokehead,” the bouncer said, grabbing Izzy’s forearms and trying to dislodge him. “He left a few minutes ago.” 

Izzy jerked the guy away from the wall for leverage to slam him again. “Where the fuck did he go?”

“How the fuck should I know?!” 

There was movement in Izzy’s peripheral vision-- the other two bouncers enclosing him on both sides. 

One of the approaching men pulled a taser from his pocket, and Izzy let go of the suddenly smirking asshole’s shirt. The three of them made a spectacle out of wrestling him out the back door, and the first asshole actually pushed a foot into his lower back, shoving him out into the alley like they were in some Western comedy, or a cartoon. Then there was the distinct click of the door locking closed behind him, and the din of the club muffled only slightly behind it.

Wisps of moonlight and the faint ghostly pools of insufficient floodlights illuminated a small maze of tiny overgrown parking lots and alleys, separated by chain link, and now mostly used for storing the dumpsters of the buildings that were still in use back here. Even in the low light, the broken glass that covered the ground was visible, as were the condoms, ladies’ underthings, needles. 

Fighting the urge to sob, Izzy tried to pull as deep a breath into his lungs as possible. His whole job in life was to know what to do, and he had no fucking idea what to do anymore, what the _fuck_ was he good for--

And once his breath was fixed in his lungs, he heard, beneath the club’s racket, a scuffling sort of noise coming from the depths of the alley he stood in. He sprinted toward it, headlong into almost absolute blackness, almost tripped over the two bodies tangling on the ground. 

In a moment of wild confusion, it struck him that he couldn’t tell, in the dark, if it was consensual or not.

And then in a subsequent moment of crystal clarity, he realized it didn’t fucking matter, he was going to end this guy’s life tonight either way.

He tackled Green Jacket hard against the barrier of chain link that prevented his escape. The white noise swelled again in his head, a symphony of nothingness, as he threw himself on top of the man who had at least fifty pounds on him, but somehow didn’t stand a chance. Izzy pounded the guy’s head against the ground, but the guy struggled, and as he struggled, Izzy realized the fucker’s pants were down and his dick was still hard. 

Izzy landed between his legs first with a knee. And then when Green Jacket stopped struggling long enough to try to cover up, Izzy stood up and stomped him in the crotch. Once, his crotch. Twice, his hands attempting to shield himself. Ten times, his fucking hands were jelly, and maybe his pelvis was, too. The guy was screaming, and puking, and then there was nothing, maybe he was passed out, maybe he was dead, Izzy didn’t know. All he knew was that it was much calmer inside his head now, and it would be as long as he kept stomping--

“Hey, hey, hey--” 

It was Slash’s voice penetrating Izzy’s brain hush, popping it like a balloon, and it was a hundred arms, it felt like, trying to take hold of him, calm him down, pull him away.

When he allowed himself to be taken, he realized it was only Slash and Steven pulling at him. Duff was standing several feet away, holding onto Axl, who was-- 

Alive? Unhurt?

\-- no, hurt, bleeding from the face and cradling his ribs, but standing. Izzy couldn’t tell what else. 

Izzy already knew what else.

_jesus christ, no_

This was his fault. Axl had been out of his heat, but he wasn’t safe yet, Izzy knew that, he knew it wasn’t an everyday occurrence for an Omega’s tits to leak, he _knew_ that, and he’d fucked around and gotten his friend’s system riled up again. Then he had recklessly taken him to a place teeming with strangers full of sexual energy and booze and cocaine when he was at his most vulnerable. 

Green Jacket had smelled it on him. Had smelled _it_ on him, what Izzy had done, what Izzy had brought about in him, and it had outed Axl in a place where he had no fucking lock on his door to help him--

The distant wail of an ambulance siren snapped Izzy out of his thoughts. 

“We have to go, Iz,” Slash was saying.

The bouncers were circling Izzy again, but this time, none of them seemed willing to make a move on him. Instead, one of them said, “Get the fuck out of here, all of you, and we know nothing.”

There was a small group of curious onlookers starting to form, but it was dark, and judging from their commentary, they were all too hammered to be reliable witnesses, so Izzy sent a prayer of thanks up for that one small consolation as the five of them slipped away into the night.


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **AU. A/B/O.** Axl hurt.
> 
> Every fucking inch of his stupid fucking body hurt.

Axl hurt.

Every fucking inch of his stupid fucking body hurt.

He lay in bed, making himself be motionless, fighting the disconsonant urges in him to either shove a chair up under the doorknob as a backup to the lock, or to go share Izzy’s bed. 

There was a third urge in there, having to do with the shiny new bottle of downers on his nightstand and the vodka under the kitchen sink, but he was trying really hard not to think about that one.

After they had left the club, they had had no choice but to walk home because Axl hadn’t wanted to draw attention to himself by boarding a bus in his condition. But every step he took sent knives through his ribs and prevented him pulling a full breath, and by seven or eight blocks into the walk, Duff had ducked into an all-night diner and made a phone call. 

When he returned, he informed them that some girl called Tina was on her way to pick them up, and he reassured Axl that Tina was “cool” and she wasn’t going to ask questions, and Axl’s fucking side hurt too bad by that time to care. 

So they sat on benches outside the restaurant, trying to look like they didn’t have a fucking care in the world, for the ten minutes or eternity it took for Tina to get there, only Tina showed up with a friend in a second car that Duff had failed to mention. 

The girls left with Slash, Steven, and Izzy in one car, heading for home, and Duff forced Axl into the other car, headed for a hospital an hour from home where he could use a fake name and a fake story and nobody would give a shit less.

The hospital staff had been shockingly good about that. Axl had offered up his fake mugging story in passing to a couple of the nurses and a doctor who had seen him, but even though they nodded in all the right places, none of them seemed to buy it. They also didn’t seem surprised at all. Axl thought he should have been surprised by their _lack_ of surprise, but he somehow wasn’t. It was another night to them, and he was another patient. 

X-rays turned up a couple rib fractures, nothing remarkable, painkillers and rest, they said. And because they had already put something very friendly in his IV for the pain, he allowed himself to be examined fully. No other real injuries, aside from routine cuts and bruises. Expected to make a full recovery, physically, at least. Here’s a pill, in case the stick in your arm doesn’t work. And if the pill doesn’t work, come back and see us.

They never asked Axl if he wanted to contact the police; he imagined long experience had taught them there was no point in asking. And there wasn’t, though maybe not for exactly the reasons they probably thought.

Axl left with a prescription for painkillers, and another for downers, and tried to convince Duff to take him straight home, but Duff had insisted on stopping by an all-night pharmacy. 

Now, staring at the bottles on the nightstand, Axl was grateful, because he was pretty sure he was never leaving this room again, for any reason.

Unless it was to crawl into Izzy’s bed with him.

Man, why was that fucker picking _now_ to keep his distance? Fucking hanging around outside Axl’s door when he knew damn well he should have kept away, fucking playing games with him when they were alone together in the house, and _now_ he was gonna give Axl his fucking space? 

Fuck that noise. What an asshole.

\----------------------------------------

Izzy stared at the wall.

The house was still quiet, which was unheard of for 6am. After they had arrived home, Slash and Stevie had retired to their room on the pretense of going to bed, but Izzy knew they were likely still awake, and would be for hours. They just didn’t know what else to do right then, except to escape from Izzy’s presence. It suited Izzy fine.

Axl had disappeared into his room for awhile, before emerging to take an hour-long shower. Then he had ducked back into the solitude of his refuge again. 

Izzy had waited. First downstairs, then in his bedroom. Then downstairs again. Everywhere he went, Duff came with him, despite Izzy’s protests that he didn’t need company, and didn’t want it. Duff let him know, in no uncertain terms, that he was fine with not talking, but there was no way in fuck he was going to let Izzy spend the night alone with his thoughts, so deal with it.

And so they sat at the kitchen table while the first watery wisps of morning light leaked through the windows, and Izzy tried like hell not to ask the question he really needed to ask.

But after so long, it boiled up in him and he couldn’t stop it coming out.

“Did he-- Is he okay?”

Duff startled at the sudden interruption of the long silence. “Yeah,” he said. “He’ll be okay. He’s got a few broken ribs, but they just told him to take it easy for awhile.”

It should have been a comfort, but Izzy knew what Duff was leaving out just as surely as if he’d spoken it out loud, and he felt his shoulders wilt.

“_Fuck.”_

“He’s gonna be okay.”

“This is my fault,” Izzy said. “You know that? I couldn’t leave him the fuck alone. He told me to leave him alone, and I didn’t.”

“How is this your fault?”

“He went off his shots. He didn’t like the fucking shots, so he went off em and he was supposed to be able to trust me. I told him I wasn’t like that, I wasn’t that guy.”

The hideous sensation of oncoming tears prickled Izzy’s nose and eyes, but there was nothing he could do about it now, least of all stop himself fucking talking.

“I told him I _wasn’t that guy._ And you guys were right, by the way, he wasn’t having a nervous breakdown, he was in heat, and I was supposed to help.”

“He was in heat… _tonight?_” Duff asked. “No he wasn’t, I’ve seen what that looks like--”

“Not tonight,” Izzy said. “He just got over it. He was over it, and I started messing with him before we left the house--”

Duff sat back in his chair, scrunching his eyebrows, trying to absorb the onslaught of information. “Look,” he finally said. “I’m not gonna pretend I know a lot about this shit, cuz I don’t, and I sure as fuck didn’t know he was an Omega. But I don’t think he would have left the house if he thought he was in any danger. How are you supposed to know if he doesn’t even know?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Izzy said. “It was my job to make sure he was okay, and I fucked up.” 

Duff sat forward and pinned Izzy with his stare. “He’s gonna be okay, Iz.”

“He was raped, wasn’t he? I didn’t get there in time.”

Duff sighed. “You did what you could, Izzy. But yeah.”

\----------------------------------------

It took another hour and a half for Izzy to convince Duff to go to bed, and Izzy had found himself sitting in the hallway outside Axl’s bedroom door. Not in front of the door, exactly, like he did before, but across the hall from it, giving it space. Giving _him_ space. He figured between the painkillers and the downers that Axl was in a dreamless sleep by now, and that it wouldn’t be that much of an intrusion to just sit here for awhile, three feet from the door, now that the other man wouldn’t be aware of his presence. And cry.

He couldn’t let himself cry in front of Duff, but now he couldn’t stop. It was his job to hold things together, and to put shit back together when things fell apart, and there was no way for him to fix this. He could be the absolute best at everything he ever attempted from this moment going forward until the day he died, and there would still be no way for him to fix this. Nothing he could do would ever be enough, and the knowledge of it was like a kitchen knife stuck between his shoulder blades and twisting.

So he cried. It was the only thing he could do.

He had his face in his knees for what felt like months until he couldn’t breathe from the congestion, and when he lifted his face to wipe the tears and snot, he jumped at the blurry image of Axl watching him through his barely-cracked door. 

Izzy rubbed his eyes and waited. But the other man just tilted his head a little, in a sort of reserved scrutiny.

Then Axl gave a little snort. “Pussy,” he said, softly, before retreating back into the darkness of the room. But he left the door open.

Izzy scrambled to his feet and moved to the doorway, but stopped short of letting himself in. His hand rested on the knob. 

“Hey,” he whispered. “Do you want me to come in?”

For a few seconds there was nothing. And then, “How is it you’re this fucking bad at knowing what I want? I kinda thought we had a thing, but jesus fucking christ--”

“All _right_,” Izzy said, but he still crept into the room with all the quickness of someone in a horror movie entering a room they had heard ghosts in

_ghosts_

Axl was on the bed, facing away from the door. At first, Izzy considered sitting on the edge of the bed next to him, maybe placing a hand on his arm. But at the last moment, he toed his shoes off and got into the bed, too, pushing his body up tight behind the other man, drawing him in. 

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah.”

Izzy waited until both their breathing slowed a bit before he spoke again. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“You told me not to--”

Axl partially turned toward Izzy. “No, I didn’t.”

“At the keyboard? You told me to stop.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Izzy ran through the scene in his mind for the millionth time, and he could have sworn the other man had warned him away. 

Laying his head back down, Axl said, “Did you kill him?”

“I don’t know. I hurt him bad.”

Axl nodded, then said, “Will you stay here while I sleep?”


	9. IX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took me so long. I'm really gonna try not to do that again :/
> 
> Might include typos. I proofread but I'm sleepy.
> 
> For livewiree <3

Izzy woke up to the smell of cigarette smoke.

For a second, he was unsure where he was, or if the weird shit in his head was the residue of the nightmares he’d been having, or if it was somehow tied to reality. He opened his eyes.

Axl was leaning partially out the open window, his elbows on the sill. Wisps of smoke drifted back into the room from where he exhaled it out into the late afternoon sun. It had to be late afternoon, by the intensity of it. He took one last drag, flicked the butt out into the yard below and turned around.

“You’re awake.”

“What time is it?” Izzy said, pulling himself into a sitting position.

“Fuck if I know,” Axl said, coming back over to sit on the edge of the bed. “I haven’t left the room. And I--” He lifted his forearm and twisted it back and forth. “I lost my watch, I guess. Last night.”

“Shit,” Izzy said, the flimsy shreds of sleepy confusion he had managed to maintain evaporating. “I’ll get you a new one.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get Mrs. Montgomery to buy me a Rolex.”

“That’s not funny.”

“The fuck it ain’t,” Axl said, then sighed. “I can’t go out there, Iz. They’re all awake.”

“What do you wanna do?”

“I don’t know. Stay in here til I die?”

They sat in silence for a few minutes until an unidentifiable (but appetizing) smell began to filter into the room.

“Is someone _cooking_?” Izzy said. “Since when do any of those fuckers cook?”

He stood and went to the door, cracked it just enough to see a bit of the living room below and a sliver of the kitchen door. All three of them, just like Axl had said, and they were all scuttering around, busy, doing things Izzy couldn’t much make out. They were quiet, too. Focused on whatever the hell it was they were doing.

Izzy closed the door and turned around. “I think they’re _cleaning the house_, too.”

“No shit?” Axl said, getting up to look for himself. But the squeaking of footsteps ascending the stairs stopped him in his tracks.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “Do we pretend we’re still asleep?”

“I don’t know, man. You want a poisoned apple? Make it real convincing?”

Axl opened his mouth to respond but a light knock on the door caused him to shut his mouth and thrust a silent middle finger in Izzy’s direction instead. 

The knock was followed by Duff’s voice, quiet and unsure. “Hey, you guys awake? I made spaghetti if you’re hungry. And awake.”

Rolling his head in Izzy’s direction, Axl gave him a look of defeat right before popping both middle fingers in the direction of the door. Then he exhaled heavily and opened it. 

Duff was surprised. “Oh. Um. I didn’t wake you up-- Did I?” he said, scanning the room for Izzy. 

“No, we were up.”

“Well, there’s food made. It’s nothing special, but it’s not bad.”

“Thanks,” Axl said, but made no move to leave the room. 

“So, um… I guess I’ll see you down there. If you’re hungry.”

“Yeah, we’ll be down.”

“Okay.”

Axl’s hand twisted the doorknob out of Duff’s sight, but Izzy watched it with a mixture of claustrophobia and amusement as Duff stood there for about ten seconds too long. When he finally turned to go back down the stairs, Axl closed the door politely before turning around and

“_Fuck that,”_ he whispered. “That’s _bullshit._ I don’t wanna go down there and have fucking social hour.”

“Why’d you tell him you would?”

“Did you hear him? He fucking made spaghetti.”

“Who cares, spaghetti is the easiest food in the world to make.”

“Tell that to Slash, remember when he put water on to boil and almost caught the kitchen on fire?”

Izzy sighed. “Yeah, you got a point.”

“And what if he put hamburger in it! And they’re _cleaning_\--”

“Okay, I get it. So we just-- I don’t know. Make it as quick as possible. Scarf the food and get the fuck out.”

Pulling a deep inhale, Axl said, “All right. Okay. They’re just trying to be helpful, right?”

“Right.”

“They don’t realize that I’d be much happier if they just left me the fuck alone and that I’d really like to punch em all in the fucking nuts for acting weird.”

“Right. Trying to help.”

“Okay then,” Axl said, and pulled the door open slowly. This time, there was nobody in sight below, and his shoulders sagged a little with what Izzy assumed was relief. 

By the time they got to the kitchen, they still hadn’t encountered anyone else, but the spaghetti pot was sitting on the stove, still hot. There was ground beef in it. 

“I _told_ you,” Axl said.

The others had apparently retreated to their rooms or the garage or to fuck knows where, as nobody appeared for the time it took for Axl and Izzy to eat.

\----------------------------------------

Axl’s body was molded into Izzy’s, the muscles soft and yielding this time. Izzy’s face was pressed against the back of the man’s head, his nose buried into hair still slightly damp from a shower and scented of coconut shampoo.

The question bubbled out of him before he had a chance to vet it for how it might be interpreted. “Did you take any of those downers tonight?” 

“Yeah, why?”

“Cuz you feel like a limp noodle.”

“The Percocet too.”

“Damn.”

“Why? You want some?”

“Nah, I just-- Never mind.”

Axl wiggled over onto his back and looked at Izzy with the serene half-smile of someone whose worries have been chemically deleted. “Tell me.”

“It’s nothing.”

The serene half-smile stretched into something vaguely feline and somewhat wicked. 

“You wanna take advantage of me?”

“No.”

“Oh come on,” Axl purred, sliding cool fingers up the burning skin of the back of Izzy’s neck, under and through his hair. “Not even a little kiss?”

“Are you stoned right now?” Izzy asked, knowing Axl heard the shaking in his voice, and knowing Axl felt his sudden hardness against his leg. 

Axl shook his head, grinning, and mouthed the word _nope_.

“Prove it,” Izzy said, and Axl laughed.

“Like how? You want me to recite the alphabet backwards, officer?”

“Yeah. I do.”

Grinning again, Axl hoisted himself to his knees and, swaying a little, planted himself with his thighs astride Izzy’s hips. “Z, y, x…” he said, and leaned down, pressing his mouth to Izzy’s. 

Izzy knew it was coming, but it still took his breath. Like a sudden cold wind had brushed his body, he gasped with the shock of it.

“W, v, u, t, s…” Axl whispered into the space between Izzy’s lips, the air of his words tickling Izzy’s tongue, and then he laughed again.

He was still swaying a little, but his body was held systematically too high to allow Izzy to grind against him. Izzy wanted to pull him down, force him to him.

“R, q, p, ohhh…”

“Oh god, fuck you, man,”

Axl giggled. “You gonna arrest me now? Maybe I’m a little under the influence after all.”

“I don’t kn-- How do I do this, man? What the fuck am I supposed to do right now?”

Sitting back, Axl put a shushing finger to Izzy’s lips. Then he dragged himself off the other man’s body and sat next to him.

“You’re not allowed to talk,” he said. “For the rest of the night.”

Izzy opened his mouth to question the order, then thought better of it and just nodded. 

Returning the nod with a distinct approval, Axl clambered into the space between Izzy’s knees. 

Izzy squeezed his eyes shut and tried to blank the thoughts from his mind, but they wouldn’t go. They raced through his brain, maybe only a little dulled in flavor and texture from his efforts to suppress them, like a film reel spinning blessedly too fast to decipher the movie etched into it. 

He sucked in a breath when he felt Axl’s fingers unzip his pants and breach them, sliding inside them without apprehension. Grasping his dick.

“Hey, Iz,” Axl whispered.

Izzy opened his eyes, but didn’t speak. He didn’t know if he was allowed yet.

“Remember when I said I wouldn’t do Omega things?” Axl said, grazing his fingertips over the superheated flesh he held in his opposite hand. He leaned down and flicked his pretty eyelashes upward so that his gaze locked with Izzy’s. “I lied,” he said, and took the other man’s cock in his mouth, deep, to his throat. 

Izzy fought the urge to push himself harder into the depths of that willing throat, but he couldn’t stop himself, and within the blinking of his suddenly blurry eyes, he had his fists knotted into Axl’s coconut-scented hair, forcing his face down harder. But a sudden sharp pain in his balls--

“Ow! _Fuck!_”

\--caused him to jerk his hands free and scramble halfway to sitting up before Axl grabbed him by the thighs to brace himself.

Struggling for breath through sudden laughter, Axl said, “Don’t fucking do that ever again. If I wanna deep-throat you, I’ll do it myself.”

“Okay,” Izzy panted. 

“I mean it.”

“I said _okay_.”

Clicking his tongue, Axl said, “Testy, testy baby,” and cupped a hand under Izzy’s still-throbbing balls. “Sorry I twisted your nuts. Your cock tastes good though.”

“_Goddddd_, why are you _doing_ this to me?” 

“I don’t know,” Axl said, lightly fingering the head of Izzy’s dick. “Why are _you_ even talking? I thought I told you to shut up.”

Izzy reached out and snagged the waist of Axl’s pants, pulled him in close enough to unfasten them. “Why don’t you make me?” he breathed. 

Tugging the now-opened front of his pants away from Izzy’s hands, Axl stood to finish pulling them off. As he stomped them underfoot, he wobbled again, staggering slightly sideways before landing back on the bed. When he pushed the intruding hair back off his face, he was smiling, but Izzy said,

“Are you sure--”

\-- and got interrupted. Axl shoved a finger to his mouth, hard, grinding his lips against his teeth. Then he turned himself around and straddled Izzy’s face.

“Think this’ll make you shut up?” he said, but Izzy was already pulling his cock down into his mouth. 

_god, it--_

“_Fuck,”_ Axl gasped. 

The thrum of his thigh muscles by Izzy’s ears intensified, and he felt the other man’s hands grasp his own thighs, holding on for support, like he had when he’d been laughing except--

_you’re not laughing now, are you baby?_

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck,”,_ Axl whined. “Oh god-- Iz--” 

The sound of his voice, breathless and helpless to the pleasure _he_ was creating caused a rush of heat in Izzy’s groin. Once, twice, again. Faster. 

He yanked Axl’s hips down to his face and held them there, the man’s dick suctioned down hard into the recesses of his mouth and throat, and Axl’s voice, so recently whining and up in his head register, came down into the pit of his chest.

“Izzy,” he groaned in the baritone that contrasted so hypnotically with the pheromones he put off, “don’t stop--”

And almost before the words were out of his mouth, that mouth was full of Izzy’s cock, sucking hard and fast like a man dying of thirst. 

Izzy wasn’t sure which one of them came first. 

All he knew was the taste of the other man’s come was unlike anything he had experienced before. It wasn’t as sweet as the tit milk had been, maybe even a little bitter. Like come, but not like it. Addictive.

Holy fuck, the heats were gonna be impossible.

Izzy clamped his lips down as Axl withdrew his dick, so he could squeeze the last drops from him, and pulled another one of those baritone groans from the man as he did so. 

_Fuck,”_ Axl said, before collapsing on top of Izzy, his head in the crook of Izzy’s thigh, and planting soft kisses along the man’s dick and brutalized balls. 

Shivering at the contact, Izzy refused to notice that Axl’s ass was spread right in front of his face and it would be so easy to at least peek at it, maybe even try for a gentle kiss, or…

Izzy closed his eyes.

“Hey, Iz,” Axl said, pulling himself up and off of Izzy. He sounded sleepy. 

“Yeah?” Izzy opened his eyes to see Axl righting himself in the bed and snuggling in next to him.

“Was it better than the hooker?”

A hundred feelings and kneejerk retorts came to him, but Izzy considered just in time that it might be a genuine question. So he said,

“You have no idea.”

A few moments passed in silence, and Izzy thought Axl might have already been asleep when he said, “Hey, Ax?”

“Mm?”

“Don’t hate me in the morning, okay?”

“Why would I hate you?” Axl mumbled.

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I just kind of feel like--”

But Axl was already asleep.


End file.
